What works best: Fists or Honey?

Once I've made a connection with a client, we often stay in touch over a period of years with the occasional "booster shot" session in between when something difficult comes up. One particular client I have worked with, off and on, for over fifteen years. He has changed a lot over the time from the proverbial hard-ass, no nonsense manager to a more caring and approachable "human being". He said to me the other day,"I'll tell you the truth, I'm not sure I like what I have turned into. It's not that I want to go back to my old ways with employees, but I'll tell ya, they seem to be all over me these days wanting this or wanting that or crying when they don't get their way and stuff. This NEVER happened to me in the past, they never came to me with unusual vacation requests or time off and it seems they do it ALL the time now. I've gone soft and I am paying for it but good now!"

It's an interesting situation really. When he was a hard-ass his employees were too afraid to approach him and now that he is more accessible, he deals with issues he never would have before. Unfortunately if we are willing to leave our solitary confinement cells and engage the world, which only a minority of people really do in their lives, we are asked to become more vulnerable to others' vulnerabilities. That means we have to become more solid in ourselves and more proficient in our ability to manage others. Employees unconsciously project their parental needs onto managers and that means when they feel undernourished in their lives at times, they will come with unreasonable requests to either get some nourishment ("I am special because you broke the rules for me") or get negative confirmation ("Your refusal proves I am unlovable").

The important place as a manager is not to cave to the onslaught of unreasonability because once one employee sees a rule broken for another, they too could approach you with a "special" request to prove they are "special" also.

In truth, the issue is not between "fists" (no special requests!) or "honey" (anything you want, dear), the issue is consistency. Consistency, we know, establishes boundaries and thus safety for the regressive psychological places we can all fall into when our lives as a whole turn chaotic and we look to our boss to make us feel better. My client's newly developed approachability only made him an easier target for such requests. The good news about the trouble of having to deal with these employee issues is that it allows this manager to forge a much deeper connection and therefore higher loyalty from his employees because he "got in the mud" with them. This works on both the conscious and unconscious level and is truly worth the annoyance in the long run---though that is hard to convince folks of initially.
(For further discussion of this principle see Fundamental One in my book)

"Manager" or "Steward of Souls"?

I had an executive manager say to me recently, "Kevin, I just want these people to do their jobs and leave me alone---they got me dealing with their marriages, divorces, kid's problems, everything. Just do your jobs and leave me alone!" After a bit of laughter we paused in silence both probably thinking the same thing: What are we really doing here?
I used to think managing people was more of a transactional experience: I do this so you can do that and we are all finished at the end of the day, NEXT! I now realize there is something much more important going on here, but it is only available to those who are able to move out of their everyday transactions and enter the larger picture---dare I say the "transcendent" picture of management. By this I simply mean that as an employer you have the possibility of experiencing something beyond the every day task orientation of your work world.

All I want to say for now is that I answered my clients statement by saying, "You thought you were just here to hire employees and get a job done and then one day you woke up and found out you were really a steward of souls."

He laughed and then went silent. "Yea," he said, "I think I know what you mean."

(For further discussion of this topic see Fundamental Three in my book)

It's HARD out there for a Manager!

An issue that comes up repeatedly with my clients is the difficulty of managing people. There are so many layers to this issue I just want to touch on a couple of points. Once our corporate culture allowed people to address each other by their first names instead of by Mr. and Mrs/Ms. so and so, corporate "professionalism" began its decay. Many people do not even remember a time when employees address their bosses by Mr. or Ms., but it was the expected behavior---watch Mad Men on T.V. to see how it used to be. Why I say this is complex to explain, but suffice it to say once there is no separation between our business self and our casual self then the psychology we present when we come to work is not different than our home/personal psychology. This loss of boundary, exemplified by using first names between workers, means there is no filter between how I treat/react to my friends and how I treat/react to my boss/client (remember we also addressed our clients as Mr. or Ms. too). This means there is no environmental filter for our worst or most regressive behaviors. "Leave your personal issues at home" was the mantra in our corporate past. It was not that this was always possible to have done in reality, it just meant there was an expectation to put work/client first and leave personal issues/needs/quirks at home. That expectation alone gave at least a filter for much of the dysfunctional, aggressive or regressive behaviors we deal with these days in co-workers on a daily basis. It is HARD out there for managers precisely because there is no expectation of a higher level of psychological operation than what one does when they are at home with friends.

So where does that leave us? That means we are now as managers having to deal more readily with every unaddressed childhood psychological pattern an employee has to offer because as a manager, you are now the unconscious, parental projection screen.
Sound fun? It ain't. Let me add here this also goes both ways because managers are throwing their own unresolved authority material onto their employees also---but that is another article.

Now you see why blending psychology/counseling and business will soon be no longer a luxury, but an imperative.
It's just HARD out there!
(For a deeper explanation please see Fundamental Eight in my book)

Me, write a book?!

I should start by explaining how this book got written. Many years ago I got together with colleagues after work to talk about our day. At some point during the conversation somebody would tell a story about the "crazy" thing someone did that really hurt or angered them due to the "off the wall" nature of it. "Oh they didn't mean it" or "Oh they probably weren't thinking" was the common response from the group in an attempt to comfort the person. My reaction was to use humor to soothe and I would throw out some one liner with the attitude of "but of course they did this because everyone always...." followed by a statement of seeming fact. The brashness of it always got a laugh, but then I was challenged to prove it. After a lengthy, albeit impromptu, explanation there was often stunned silence. "That makes sense somehow" became the usual reaction by the group. Soon it became expected that I could come up with some one-liner for EVERY hurtful conflict that came up and I grandiosely continued to take on the challenge. Of course it did not always work, but I was up for the task. Eventually nine of these aphorisms stood the test of time and became multi-layered and applicable to several levels of the conflicts they represented. What started out as a humorous challenge turned into a serious book---with the funny included, of course.
That is how I wrote a book.

Let's get this Party started!

When I first heard about bloggers I thought it sounded ridiculous and vowed never to participate in such a thing. Humble pie, I've since found, is a wonderful dish on occasion. I've realized since that time that there could be value in putting up some issue oriented pieces and allow whoever finds them to either ignore or attend to the material. I do what I do and the readers take it or leave it---all this a fancy way to say welcome to my blog.
I intend to write some articles on topics I am working on with clients (with their permission of course) and allow a forum for some Q&A from others who have an issue in their personal/professional life they might like me to address some part of. So go ahead and "Ask Coach Kevin" and maybe I will have something to add to your situation.